How Notion made AI cute

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When Notion's AI is thinking, its eyebrows do a wave.

It's a small drawing, two eyes and a nose and a pair of eyebrows. When it hits an error the whole face comes apart for a second and then puts itself back together. The team nicknamed it Nosy.

Underneath that face is an agent that will go off and work across your documents all on its own. It's about the closest thing I've seen to the "AI employee" we’re all being told will both revolutionise the way we work as well as put us out of a job.

So no surprises that when Notion shipped agents, able to work across hundreds of pages on their own, they got criticised too. But the complaints were all software-related. It got called slow and bloated, the agents hallucinated, and Notion was accused of chasing AI while other product basics were broken.

But all of those issues are fixable, and frankly they’re to be expected with any major software release. On the other hand, Duolingo’s backlash came from a feeling of betrayal.

Obviously these were very different. Duolingo was announcing changes to how they'd run their own company, while Notion released a feature you use yourself. But if backlash to Duolingo’s announcement came from widespread concern about AI putting real people out of work, shouldn’t Notion releasing a literal AI agent receive even more push back?

The face designs shipped that month. The agents themselves arrived a year later.

Open any AI feature in any product and I bet you'll see a sparkle icon. It’s the universal symbol for AI, because it works just like “magic”. But when every brand in a category reaches for the same mark, the mark stops identifying anyone.

Notion's team treated it as something to get out of. Ryo Lu, then a design product lead there, said they needed "to do something that differentiate ourselves from the sparkles in the world". His colleague Linus Lee said "the sparkle emoji is still powerful in part because people attribute AI to magic. But it's hard to understand what it's doing".

I honestly think this is the most effective decision in the whole story.

From the inside, it makes sense to position AI as magical because that’s the reaction people have when using it for the first time. It genuinely does feel like magic, being able to ask a machine to do something and for it to then go off and do it independently. But we forget that for the vast majority of people, that feeling of magic has quickly turned into genuine terror. Trust in AI is at an all time low, and people are sceptical about how it will impact our future. Telling those people the product is “magic” is telling them they don't need to know or see how it works. The only way to build trust with them is to open up a bit and make it more easily relatable.

Notion nearly fell into the trap. Initial sketches included wizards in different hats for different kinds of expertise, and a wand that turned into a pencil or a brush depending on the job. Apparently, that work got thrown out because introducing magic didn't add meaningful clarity for the user.

Everyone else is designing for how advanced the technology is. Notion designed for how much of it you can understand, which is why the wizards went in the bin.

The whole character is two eyes, a pair of eyebrows and a nose. "The nose is almost like a baton that conducts your eye," Giampietro said. "For error states, it falls apart and puts itself back together."

The reason it works was discovered 30 years ago, with the launch of Clippy in Microsoft Office 97. Notion recently asked Steven Sinofsky, who ran the Office product team at Microsoft, whether he'd give an assistant a face again. He pointed at a Stanford study called The Media Equation, which found that people generally assume technology is 'right'. By giving them something softer than a normal interface, "they stop blaming themselves for mistakes and are more open to questioning back and forth". The face positions the software as a collaborator to work with, rather than a tool to wrangle.

Notion even took it a step past the drawing, allowing users to personalise their agent with accessories and give it a name. That helps develop a sense of ownership, because a personified thing you customised yourself is hard to be afraid of.

Notion presents agents as time back on the work you care about. You won't find references to headcount reduction anywhere near them, or any mention of “AI employees”. They specifically do not want you to call it an assistant. It helps avoid comparison, like how Apple refuses to call their Vision Pro a “VR headset” and instead it’s a “spatial computer”, but it also comes back to addressing consumer fears about being replaced by AI.

Notion's cofounder Ivan Zhao said he didn't want Notion to feel like a productivity app at all, and that he wanted it to feel like playing Tears of the Kingdom (don’t worry I looked it up for you, it’s a Legend of Zelda video game). The art director translated that brief, saying "it's very easy to build things, and there's a complexity behind the game, but you wouldn't tell when you're playing it".

The focus was on hiding the difficulty and keeping you inside the work.

Notion could achieve that because it’s what they were already known for. They've spent years selling themselves on making complicated things simple, and on supporting your “life's work”, which is a different promise from a tool that sells you more output. So a face that says "I'm helping you get on with it" is just the thing they've always said, drawn instead of written.

With AI, every product that acts on your behalf raises the same question in your head. What is this doing, and what does it mean for me? That can be answered in launch posts and marketing campaigns, or it can be answered in the product itself. A sparkle tells you you don’t need to know what’s happening, it’s just “magic”. A pair of eyebrows tells you it's thinking through the problem alongside you.

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